Like chinese boxes, this documentary not only brilliantly shows the institucional and political corruption behind the police-orchestrated hoax known as ‘4F’, which began on February 4th, 2006 in Barcelona’s calle Sant Pere Més Baix, but it also extends in a coil the understanding of horror to wider levels of society: from the police, to the judges, to the press, to social services, to the city council, to gentrification, in brief, to power in itself. Like before Joaquim Jordà’s De Nens (2003), now Ciutat Morta leads us from a particular history to the deep and terrifying comprehension of the general, of society, of the city. To the memory of Patricia Heras, the dead poet.
From may 5th to 10th, 2014, the International conference “El control del espacio y los espacios de control”, will be held in the University of Barcelona, organized by the review Geocrítica; with the linked reviews ScriptaNova and Biblio3w, this is one of the most important and interesting publication on urban issues in the whole spanish-speaking area. The conference is public and admission free of charge; we suggest these sessions, in which some members of our OACU group will be involved: may 6th, Ocupación del espacio y control de los individuos at 9am, Segregación social y urbana a at 6.30pm; may 9th, Organización económica, poder y control at 9am, Cambios en las formas de control at 4pm.
In our ethnographies they are often in the background, as in this photo taken by Jordi Secall in 2003 [see his blog]. But professor MCDONOGH proposed many years ago the study of the good families of Barcelona – the ‘catalan oasis’. Thursday, february 28th, 7pm at Reina de Àfrica (calle Bolivar 10, Vallcarca), debate “Towards an anthropology of catalan elites” with Gary W. McDonogh, organized by GTEEP – GRECS – OACU
el desahucio
"bueno,
en primer lugar, te sientes echado, no querido, violentado. se rompe de pronto el universo ese repetitivo e invariable y, sin avisar, todo zozobra,
nada parece real.
incluso los cambios en el barrio,
los derribos,
no tienen ninguna connotación positiva, sólo resultaban amenazadores,
tristes.
trasladar una empresa es complicado.
es decir,
debería serlo, pq una empresa, por encima de todo,
la forman personas.
eso quiere decir q se trastorna –de pronto- toda la cosmogonía de tooodos los integrantes...
"In Istanbul, we crossed the ecological limits, crossed the population limits, crossed the ecological limits. If you ask me where it is all going to lead, I will quote from Doğan Kuban: chaos" Mücella Yapıcı, chamber of architecture of Istanbul.
[/caption]
“An oasis of luxury in the capital of mafia" was the title chosen by a peruan newspaper in publishing this photo reportage about Naples' Circolo Posillipo. But in spite of many elements that might make us believe it, we can't pretend that Napols is just like a stereotype of a South American city, where the rich lock up in their golden bunkers, while in the streets the people shoot each other with guns. Partly because the members of Circolo Posillipo are not as rich as we could imagine; but mainly because Naples, as south american cities are, is a place far more complex than the unambiguous narrations we receive from the media, that now only see/sell the violent deaths, criminality, urbanistic and social chaos, while in the Nineties they only showed the monuments that were reopening, the dynamism of the new upper classes, and the rebirth of tourism. Even them the camorra controlled the neighborhoods, the peripheries were second-class places, the young people were beginning to assume crack and cocaine, hidden by the invisibility in which they were being kept. All these things, at that time, were not so fashionable as they are it now.
"Here we were all born in leftover neighborhoods, rounded by leftovers, waiting to grow up, to get old, or better said, to deconstruct ourselves; so we can receive all your sociologists, all your social psychologists, your substitute mayor, your worst dressed politician, the sons of your good neighborhoods that will give us examples on how to use abilities and efforts to help us out of the leftover neighborhoods; this is, you give us your leftover social science, your leftover psychology, your leftover mayor, your leftover solidarity, even your leftover fear, for sometimes you think that you yourselves could have been born in the leftover neighborhoods, that you could be leftovers yourselves; this is why you come down here to look at us playing the part of the assisted classes, useless even for production because robotics replaced us, and because our condition of leftovers can't compete anymore with leftovers from even more impoverished parts of the planet.
To understand the recent urban and social transformations in Barcelona's Barrio Chino, historical center of the town (that now, after gentrification and demolitions, we have to call "Raval") often the attention goes towards the subproletarians living and smuggling in the neighborhood: "an underworld of immoral behaviour" (1943). But it would be more useful to study another kind of commerces, much darker and of greater scale, than those of the underworld. The catalan bourgeoisie had been trying to transform and demolish Barcelona's city center during more than a century: this project had to wait during the dictatorship, but in the eighties the old dream came back to life. "These 200 families that had been holding power during 150 years, invested in purchasing blocks of flats in central Barcelona, so they would make lots of money when these neighborhoods would have been demolished and rebuilt". Read Adolf Castaños' Memory and its distortions (inedited, 2010) in English (pending revision). (original Spanish)
Copyright © 2024 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes